Fatal Errors in Hospitals in US !!!

Fatal errors push hospitals to make big changes

As many as 98,000 deaths are caused by medical mistakes in hospitals each year.Institute of Medicine (IOM), part of the National Academy of Sciences, released a report called "To Err Is Human." It showed that about 1 of every 200 patients admitted to a hospital died because of a treatment mistake - as many as 98,000 fatalities a year. That was more, the report noted, than died in 1998 from highway accidents (43,458), breast cancer (42,297), or AIDS (16,516). While some critics later attacked the number as merely a loosely supported estimate, others contended that because of widespread undercounting, the number was almost certainly far too low.

"There's something about that report that struck pay dirt in the American psyche and the health-profession psyche," says Robert Wachter, a professor of medicine at the University of California at San Francisco and coauthor with Kaveh Shojania of the book "Internal Bleeding: The Truth Behind America's Terrifying Epidemic of Medical Mistakes," published earlier this year. "We discovered the epidemic of medical mistakes with the IOM report."


read the whole story in CS Monitor

http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0708/p14s01-ussc.html

A suggestion is that get a project allotted for studying this from www.cos.com a site I mentioned earlier.How many are listening and more importantly willing to act is what I wonder!!!Come on concerned people lead the way and set an example for the remaining among us to follow.